Monday, July 9, 2012

Old learnings

I love the picture of baby Seth Killian trolling the shit out of dudes twice his size at the local arcade, then grabbing the cash and running for his life.

His comments about the very early days of Street Fighter remind me of one of my first epiphany moments with the game. Being young and without transportation it was difficult for me to learn anything in the arcade. My early interest peaked with the Super Nintendo release of Street Fighter 2. Once that game made it into my house my brother and I would log in several hour long sessions, always with him playing Guile and me playing Blanka because DP motions are a bitch on a pad. It is amazing that we didn't kill each other for real; perhaps Street Fighter was the perfect outlet for our tense relationship.

(It stopped being tense right about the time he got bigger than I am and I learned to shut my mouth)

This was long before I knew anything about canceling normals into specials. Hell, I barely knew what a combo was. We also didn't know that jumping attacks needed to be blocked standing. I remember the very moment that I figured this out: we were sitting in the living room and the idea to block high finally dawned on me. He was baffled.

'I am doing the exact same thing and now it isn't working!'

My father who cared nothing for video games glanced up from the couch. At first I thought he was going to tell my brother to shut up, but instead he watched for a few seconds, realized that I had just learned something, adapted, gave me a nod and let my brother suffer. I was being rewarded for critical thinking with both wins and by being allowed to torture my younger brother.

He figured it out on his own eventually, but not before a lot of gloating on my part.

...

It was very difficult for me to figure out where the downloadable content of Skyrim ended and where all the unfinished quests from my first play through began, so I had to put an artificial end date and time on it to keep the backlog list from getting any longer. On the last day, after finishing off a thieves guild quest that had me wipe out an opposing guild and leave their corpses to rot in their little cave of a hideout, I decided to check up on the vampire queen who had moved in with the Dawnguard.

The macguffin of the Dawnguard main quest was Auriel's bow. Stat wise it was not as good as my enchanted crossbow, but it did an extra 200% damage to vampires with special arrows and there was a prophecy about how it could blot out the sun if corrupted with *dun dun dunnnn* the blood of a pure vampire. I sauntered up to the vampiress and and casually asked her to bleed on a few arrows. She agreed, but only because she had seen how quickly I killed her father and all his servants.

Curious as to what would actually happen, I quick traveled into the middle of nowhere and waited until noon, then fired a tainted arrow at the sun. At first there was nothing. I was disappointed.

Then the sun turned a dark red and the remainder of the skies glowed. The wind kicked up and there was what sounded like moaning in the air. This may not have been a good idea. Save. Quit. A problem to be dealt with during the next bit of DLC.

Run, coward!

This blog, in its present form, is a way to force me to not game away all my free time every day in the only way I know how: talk about it instead. Also, I play a lot of crap; read about it here so you don't have to. And if the complaining starts to get out of hand, leave anonymous, hateful comments.